Someone like the targeted Peter Wightman.
Four
I dentity stealing, Harvey Jordan’s dedicated profession, is an overcrowded activity, for a variety of reasons, all of them to the thief’s benefit and favour. It is a crime almost childishly – and mostly legally – easy to commit and therefore so prevalent that law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed, reducing the risk of detection and even less of arrest virtually to zero. People – supposedly clever, financially savvy people – appear to ignore every piece of advice and warning given by every financial organization or adviser. And those same financial organizations and advisers, despite that advice and those warnings, keep showering the head-in-the-sand birdbrains with ever more credit facilities and cash-gaining opportunities to be milked like a milch cow by ever ready suckling predators. Of whom Harvey Jordan judged himself the most adept, if not the most financially successful single operator.
Jordan could have doubled, maybe trebled, his income; even gained the ultimate position of being the most financially successful. But that would have required his masterminding and controlling a gang as so many others in the business did, multiplying their ID stealing – and profits – tenfold or more. Which did not attract or tempt Harvey Jordan in the slightest. If he ran a gang, its profit would obviously have to be divided by its number, which, while increasing his personal income by as much as another tax-free?2 million a year, correspondingly increased among one or more of that number the likelihood of error, incompetence or idiotic mistake, resulting in his being caught, despite the odds against that occurring remaining in his and their favour. Harvey Jordan knew he was good. What he didn’t know – and wasn’t interested in finding out – was how consistently good others were. Nor did he imagine others, for their part, would have the patience to operate with the care and attention to detail that he did and upon which he would have insisted in any extended partnership.
It had taken him three months to prepare himself fully to impersonate Peter Thomas Wightman, a 42-year-old newly elevated senior partner in the legal firm of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright in Chancery Lane, in the Holborn district of London. He’d learned the man’s name and that of the firm within which he’d been promoted from the legal notices of the Daily Telegraph and further researched it from the publicly available Bar directory issued by the General Council of the Bar and Waterlow’s Solicitors and Barristers Directory, in which the names of all solicitors and barristers in England are listed. Who’s Who gave Jordan the prep school – Downside – and Balliol College, Oxford, at which Wightman had read law. From the main office of the Company House register at Crown Way, Maindy, Cardiff, he legally obtained details of the after tax profit of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright and the individual income and dividends to all its partners, including Wightman.
Jordan discovered Wightman’s age – but far more importantly for his eventual purposes the maiden name of the man’s mother – by paying a series of ten-pound search fees for details of births, deaths and marriages from the Family Records Centre, ECl, London. The maiden name of Wightman’s mother had been Norma Snook. On the marriage certificate to John Wightman, an accountant, she was described as a solicitor. Peter Wightman had married Jean Maidment eighteen years earlier, at St Thomas’s Church, Maidstone. There were three children, and from the voters’ register records at the British Library he’d found the family lived in Kitchener Road, Richmond, Middlesex, and by memorizing the number plate as he drove past the detached property – and then checking at the national car registration office in Gwent, Wales, purporting to have been involved in a slight traffic accident with someone who had not stopped – confirmed that Wightman’s car was a dark green, two-year-old Jaguar.
The detail of Jordan’s research was continued in the form of the final precaution he always took just prior to embarking upon a new operation; this was never to work from the address of the flat in Marylebone, which he owned under his own, genuine name, but always from another apartment rented in the name of his intended victim. That, for his assault upon Peter Wightman, was in Sydney Street, in Chelsea, from which he worked countrywide and with his usual untroubled and undetected success for a month, which ended with a somewhat disappointing profit of?154,000.
His final role for Sydney Street was to use it as the base for his next rental in Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, under the name of Paul Maculloch, a Harley Street cosmetic plastic surgeon whose Al credit rating Jordan intended to use to its full and hopefully increased advantage.
He’d telephoned ahead to warn the Marylebone concierge of his return and when he arrived, the man, John Blake, already had his accumulated mail bundled and waiting for him.
‘A good trip, Mr Jordan?’ enquired the man.
‘I’ve known better,’ admitted Jordan, picking up his letters.
Five
Attorneys-at-law was stridently displayed in red, beneath the identifying letterhead of Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein recorded in black typescript. The Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022 address of the firm was in black, too. So, running down the right-hand side of the covering letter, were the names of the fifteen lawyer partners, headed by those of the three company founders. The man who had in legibly, rounded letters signed Jordan’s letter – David Bartle – was the fifth in the list, presumably indicating his seniority. The letter, dated three weeks earlier, announced itself to be a summary of the official documents that were enclosed, couched in stiffly formal legalese.
Harvey William Jordan was cited under N.C.G. S Section 1-52(5) as defendant in the forthcoming preliminary hearing, date still to be negotiated and agreed between all involved parties, in the cross-petitioned divorce action between Alfred Jerome Appleton and Alyce Louise Appleton, nee Bellamy. Alfred Jerome Appleton was bringing suit against Harvey William Jordan claiming substantial damages for alienation of affection and criminal conversations, resulting in the initiation of divorce proceedings. Coupled and enjoined in those proceedings were further, but separately itemised, claims brought by Alfred Jerome Appleton for stress, loss of earnings resulting from that stress, public humiliation and derision resulting from that stress, damages and loss of commercial earnings and public confidence in the firm of Appleton and Drake from the forthcoming divorce proceedings, and medical and counselling expenses resulting from each and every aspect and condition arising from each, several or all of those allegations against Harvey William Jordan.
David Bartle sought immediate written acknowledgement of receipt of his letter and its accompanying formal claims, together with the name, street and city address, email and telex contacts with Harvey William Jordan’s attorney with whom all further and future correspondence leading up to the indeterminate hearing date could be conducted.
It was difficult for Jordan to think, as cold as he was, shivering as he was, which had nothing to do with how cold he felt. There was too much to co-ordinate, to put into the order in which he had to deal with it, get out of it. How to get out of it? The wrong question, he corrected himself, the shaking subsiding. How had he got into it? Been found? Discovered? And by whom? A private enquiry agent – a private detective – obviously. Jordan felt a fresh sweep of unreality, snatching out for the discarded papers, shuffling through until he found the itemised statements of claim. It was all there, his suite number at the Carlton hotel in Cannes, registered as a solitary occupancy but pointedly separated by only a short distance along the same corridor from that of Alyce. And then their odyssey. Their room number, as Mr and Mrs Jordan, at the Residence de la Pinade at St Tropez and the hotels at Cagnes and at Le Saint-Paul and the Hermitage in Monaco. As well as all the restaurants in which they’d eaten, the name of the catamaran as well as that of the chartering company, in which they’d sailed to the prison of the man in the iron mask, and to Porqerolles – even, astonishingly, their individual winnings that last night at the Monaco casino. Not a private detective, acknowledged Jordan. An expert himself in the gathering of facts and information, Jordan knew it would have needed a squad to have assembled all this. And it wouldn’t be confined to just specific times against specific dates in individually identified hotels and places. There would be photographs, possibly dozens of photographs, an engulfing mud slide of identifying collages.
The coldness melted under a burn of personal anger. How, to someone supposedly so professional at always being – and remaining – Mr Invisible, could it have happened to him? How could he have remained so blissfully, blindly, stupidly unaware of his every move being tracked and recorded as intimately by not one but perhaps
